Mike McCollum: Back to Bretz 1923: His First Paper, “Glacial Drainage on the Columbia Plateau”
The lecture originally envisioned would have involved digesting the highlights of the 2500 articles which have been written about Bretz’s work since 1922. That task is best left to Vic Baker since he has written over 1,000 of those articles.
Instead, you will hear an aspect which none of the past flood experts have ever focused on, that is, looking at Bretz’s research prior to 1922 (only half a dozen articles) and how that predisposed him to find the fatal flaws in the conventional wisdom of his day.
Bretz’s first paper in 1923 (Glacial Drainage on the Columbia Plateau) represents the first shot fired in a scientific dispute in which he injected an understated glacial flood hypothesis into the tranquil waters of the scientific uniformitarianism philosophy. Bretz obviously thought that his first contribution should focus on establishing the southern extent of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet in the Spokane area as the source of the glacial meltwater which created the Channeled Scabland.
(You can download and read a PDF of Bretz’s paper by clicking on its title in the paragraph above, or at the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sKCB_MmtXDErMyFFiel8OCub8PkGjylm/view?usp=sharing. We recommend that you read it before the lecture!)
This lecture will begin with a brief summary of the most recent research into the local geology of the Spokane area, followed by a review of Bretz’s early research articles, concentrating on points that may have given him the critical background to challenge the conventional wisdom of his day. At that point the talk will focus on his 1922 field season, concentrating on the Spokane region, drifting into a discussion of till and ending by speculating about why Bretz ignored Thomas Pardee’s suggestion in 1925 that he investigate the possibility that glacial Lake Missoula was the source of the meltwater that he needed to create the Channeled Scabland. To think that Bretz might have avoided the Achilles Heel of his megaflood postulate, i.e. the flood water source, which was the focus of the 1927 denunciation of his ideas in Washington, D.C.
Speaker: Mike “Mac” McCollum, Earth Scientist, spent four years on active duty, from 1965-1969, two years in the Army Security Agency, Military Intelligence; followed by two years as an instructor of geological engineering at the Army Corps of Engineers Institute at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He spent a year with the US Geological Survey, Salt Lake City, Utah, and went on to become the vice president of the Cordilleran Geological Survey, Inc. He and his wife Linda have mapped over 500 square miles of local geology in an area where the Ice Age Flood deposits are well displayed. Over the last decade he and his wife Linda have led several of our chapter’s fieldtrips and included their ongoing research in the accompanying guidebooks. Mac is a lifetime honorary member of the Board of Directors for the IAFI Cheney-Spokane Chapter.
Click on the blue button below to join anytime after 6:45 p.m. on September 28. The lecture starts at 7:00 p.m. (A lecture recording will be available on YouTube in case you missed the live Zoom lecture.)
or use this Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89818355677?pwd=NGI3bGR1d1BJd0FpNHNOaGE1anQzUT09
IAFICS LECTURE RECORDINGS are available on our Ice Age Floods Cheney-Spokane YouTube channel. On YouTube, you can search for “IceAgeFloods-Cheney-Spokane” to access all of our lectures.